Xi: A Study in Power

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Preface

Imagine that you stop someone on the street in Europe or the US and ask them to name the most powerful person in the world. They might say the US president, or the founders of Facebook or Amazon. The more eclectic might suggest the Pope, or the owner of a news empire, like Rupert Murdoch.

In recent years, more and more people might say the current leader of China, Xi Jinping. As recognition of this, in 2017, the Economist placed Xi directly next to the then American President Donald Trump, arguing that the former had become more powerful than the latter. Despite this, few feel they really know what sort of a person and politician Xi is, nor that they understand much about the country he leads.

People believe Xi is powerful for three main reasons. The first, and most obvious, is that the economic and military capability of the People’s Republic has come from the margins in the 1980s to being at the global forefront by the late 2010s. Barring disaster, some time before 2030, Xi’s country is expected to overtake the US and become the world’s largest economy. Proof of how much this rattled x the world’s uncontested superpower at the time was that, after years of dismissing China’s hopes of ever getting to such a position, Trump became fixated on this new great competitor. This was certainly not a comfortable place for China to occupy – but in many ways being viewed so closely and jealously by Washington was the highest form of flattery for Beijing. The fact that the world’s most powerful nation felt threatened by China showed that the nation mattered. Xi’s country was no longer in the margins.

The second reason is that Xi himself seems to exemplify power. It exudes from him almost like a physical force. Since his rise to the head of the Communist Party in 2012, a body that enjoys a monopoly of organised political control in the country, he has cleared away all possible internal competition. Evidence of his desire for control is everywhere, and sometimes shocking in its detail. With the use of new technology and new messaging, and with China on the cusp of being the greatest global nation, Xi symbolises this ambition in the flesh. He speaks and acts like a leader with endless confidence. Even if this is an act, it is an effective one.

But the third reason is about the context of that power. Questioned, tested and often even humiliated in their own political environments, leaders of democracies in the West might look at Xi’s position and, perhaps, feel the slightest tinge of envy. With control of the party he leads, Xi has levers over xi the media, the military, business and practically every other part of society that other leaders could only dream of. He leads the country as a skilled conductor leads an orchestra, where the obedient players are all on message and there is no sign of dissent.

This capacity, however, was not built overnight. Xi is powerful, but much of that power is contextual. A huge amount of it derives not from him but from the political party he leads. He has also had the luck to inherit leadership of the Communist Party and the country at a time when a number of different developments have come together. Now, after decades of sacrifice and effort, is the time of feasting. Technology, the economy and the confused situation of the outside world have created a vast historic opportunity in China’s favour. The Communist Party was brought to power by Mao in 1949 and, after some disastrous adventures along the way, made stronger and sustainable by Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. All of these leaders have contributed significantly to the position that Xi is now in, and to his good fortune. Xi’s power did not come from nowhere.

What has perhaps most unsettled Western commentators is not so much China’s prominence but the way it has developed more quickly than anyone ever expected. The country has always been acknowledged by the rest of the world as being important. But half a century ago, in the 1970s, Maoist xii China was introspective, diplomatically isolated, economically undeveloped, largely rural and regarded as a place that would always struggle just to survive. Today, China looks like another country. The strongest link between these periods is the party, the entity that now has 95 million members led by Xi. It alone provides the common point between these very different eras. To work out how these two Chinas are part of the same story, showing the same ambition, one has to start with the role of the party, and understand Xi’s role within it. Xi Jinping and the Communist Party need to be seen as inseparable entities, Using unique Chinese sources, some of which have never been properly analysed in the English language before, this book attempts to do that. It also shows how extraordinary the party has been as a vehicle for Chinese modernisation and nationalism, and how formidable Xi has proved as the director of these forces.

Make no bones about it, because of the dramatic new situation China is in, Xi is possibly the one leader out of the current global heads of state that will have the greatest impact on the present and the future of the world and its development. The mere fact that he is in charge of a fifth of humanity is enough to justify this claim. But it is also merited by the fact that his country now stands on the cusp of finally achieving modernity on Chinese terms. This is a wholly new story, never seen in our times. xiii

While Xi is the symbol of these forces of national rejuvenation and ambition, we should not get carried away and start to regard him as their creator. Chinese people desire better quality of life regardless of what their current political leaders say. Part of Xi’s effectiveness has been in crafting messages and policies domestically that speak to the growing middle class and their hopes and ambitions in ways that keep them onside. Failure to see this factor clearly has been one of the key reasons why many outside China have dismissed him merely as a dictator and autocrat. He is a far more complex leader than that, even if elements of his leadership style do fall under those descriptions. The paradox of Xi Jinping is that in many ways he as an individual person does not count – rather it is the body he represents, the Communist Party of China, with its history, its sense of mission, its complete control over all organised political life in China and its view of humanity, time and social life that is important. As the leader of this body, Xi matters. Conveying his achievements and politics in ways that properly acknowledge this balance between the individual and the group they lead, and therefore have power through, is crucial.

Whatever one thinks of Xi and the system he operates in – something this book will try to explain – one thing is irrefutable. The decisions he is making and the direction his country goes in will have a massive impact on the global economy, on climate change, security and human development. Everyone xiv who cares about these things, wherever they happen to be, needs to know about Xi and have an interest in who he is, what he is doing and why. To understand our world today, it is vital to know about the leader of the world’s most influential economy, one that is deeply integrated into global supply chains that reach into our homes, one that will have a decisive impact on whether humanity is able to conquer climate change and clean up its environment and one whose leadership is shaping the most fundamental geopolitical balancing between East and West seen in modern times. For those who are interested in the affairs of the modern world, understanding Xi is crucial.

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CHAPTER ONE

Xi Jinping:

The Enigma of Chinese Power

Two decades ago, I was a British diplomat serving in Beijing. During an earlier stay, I had become aware of the leadership compound that lay beside the vast Forbidden City in the heart of the capital but had never managed to set foot in the place. However, during the visit of a senior British politician around the turn of the millennium, I was invited to accompany them to this hallowed place. The experience was disorientating. Driving through the chaotic and crushing traffic in the city centre, our embassy car swept into a side gate. It was as though we had disappeared into another world. Peace reigned. Beyond the security guards at the entrance, there was no one in sight. Classical buildings stood by tranquil lakes. The grass looked as though it had been cut by scissors. Everything was still, calm – the opposite of the metropolis, one of the largest 2 and most congested in the world, we had left outside. The place exuded an intangible sense of power.

In modern China, power is largely seen as something real, which certain people possess and others don’t, but which has an air of mystery about it. One of the numerous ‘givens’ for Western journalists covering Chinese elite politics over the past few decades is that those at the top of the ruling Communist Party of China have an abundance of it. There are not many of these people. The assumption is that they are laden with vast surfeits of this thing called ‘power’; they can run riot with it, annexing everything around them at their individual will. But is this really the case? Does ‘power’ have such a common currency and such consistent characteristics? Two of the finest historians of the modern country’s events, Fred Teiwes and Warren Sun, went to great lengths in their meticulous account of the final years of Mao’s rule to say that, while everyone can agree that he did have massive authority, ‘things were more complicated’.¹

One source of confusion about structures of power in China is the idea that leaders today are little different from the emperors who led the country during its long imperial history until 1912. Like them, Mao, Deng and Xi are similar to modern gods, ruling with absolute authority over their subjects, enjoying an almost semi-divine status. It is questionable whether Chinese emperors did in fact have such powers. 3 The vast majority of their subjects probably spent their lives completely oblivious as to who was reigning over them. But the China that Xi Jinping lives in and rules today is not the same as the Chinas that existed before. Ironically, for all the claims about the great antiquity of Chinese history, the People’s Republic of China is not yet a hundred years old. It is a young state. Places such as the United Kingdom, France and even the United States and Australia can make claims to some sort of cohesive national narrative going back at least 150 years, and in some cases much further. Their governance structures and administrations are often much better established than those of the People’s Republic in Beijing, which only took form in 1949. While the concept of ‘China’ is, on the surface, a very ancient one – and there certainly is overlap between the geographical reach of predecessor states and the current one (particularly the expansionist Qing era, 1644–1912) – one could claim that much of the country we see today has been created since the Second World War, and in many cases even more recently. Power is moulded both by what it is directed at and what it is intended to have influence over. Like water, it changes its shape depending on what it strikes against. Xi Jinping’s powers are therefore different to those of China’s leaders prior to 1949 because the place he exerts power over did not exist then.

Even after 1949, each core leader has had bespoke styles and kinds of power, as much because of the changing economic 4 and political situation of their country, as anything to do with them personally. Mao Zedong, who ruled from 1949–76, was the great founder, a figure of God-like proportions. His successor, Deng Xiaoping, who was leader from 1978–89, was more prosaic and strategic – history will probably judge him as being much more effective than Mao in creating sustainable outcomes. After Deng’s era came Jiang Zemin, who ruled as party head from 1989 to 2002. He presented a more extrovert, oft-mocked leadership style, despite the fact that with his slippery, often buffoonish character he stabilised the country after the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and recommitted to play a role in the global economy through finally joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. Hu Jintao, the faceless, egoless successor to Jiang, mastered the art of making China a vast factory for economic growth, quadrupling the size of its GDP over the decade he was in office from 2002 to 2012, an unrivalled achievement in modern history. After all of these leaders came Xi. He has been talked of, by no less a figure than President Obama, as the leader who has most quickly and effectively consolidated his position since the time of Mao. What links these different figures is that they worked within the Communist tradition of governance. Maybe Xi is the most powerful of them all. But this is because China has greater significance as a country now than it did in the past. It is not because Xi has some kind of magic quality. The reasons 5 for his power are very prosaic – China has more money, more technology, more military equipment than ever before, and this is in comparison to a West that is weakening. There is nothing mysterious in any of this.

Xi and his colleagues certainly see themselves as occupying a phase in a continuous project that started in 1949, one where their actions are only possible because of the achievements of their predecessors. Xi himself has made it clear that the idea of repudiating Mao will not happen, at least under his watch. For Xi, without the Chairman, there would be no China as it exists today, in pole position to achieve its dreams of modernity and to overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy within the next decade. If Xi is the most powerful leader of the country since Mao, this is because of the systems and structures, and achievements, that arose from the hard work of his predecessors. He himself doesn’t deny this. He will see the country achieve things that Mao dreamt of but could never realise – his country having a navy with more vessels than the US, one that is able to speak back as an equal to American presidents, one that has eradicated absolute poverty. This sense of belonging to a great tradition of Communist Party leadership since 1949 in China, therefore, is crucial in understanding Xi as a political figure.

Xi’s power also exists to serve a purpose. This is not about his own individual aims. It is about the great objective of the 6 Communist Party to build a strong, rich country. This transcends specific leaders, and particular eras. The Communist Party is an atheist organisation. But that doesn’t mean it has no faith. Belief in the almost semi-mystical entity of ‘China’ with its spiritual import, its cultural richness and human vastness is the great overarching creed that has prevailed since 1949, and it has roots that extend far further back than this. Making this China powerful, strong and central in world affairs once more, as it had been in the distant past, is the key mission. Xi is a servant of that greater mission, almost in the same way the Pope leads the Catholic Church in its mission to deliver humanity to the Kingdom of Heaven. The main difference is that for Xi’s faith, that kingdom will be found on this earth. Of all the sources of Xi’s power, this one is the most potent.

The nature of the leadership he practises needs to be interpreted as serving these larger, longer-term aims related to faith in the great nation. If we want to describe Xi as an autocrat, it is because he is serving autocratic aims. There must be total fidelity to the great cause of making China great again. This is a jealous objective, and one that does not permit any vagueness nor any lack of commitment. Xi’s leadership style can be seen as almost designed to recognise this. The autocratic cause creates the leadership style, not the other way around. This is a crucial issue, if one truly wants to understand what is happening in China today. 7

On more mundane levels, Xi’s powers also need to be seen as circumscribed and limited. The Communist Party of China does not merely have a strong guiding, nationalist faith, but also a strong identity and ethos. Most of this was created long before Xi even became a member in 1974. To succeed in it at any level means adhering to this pre-determined set of rules and customs. You become as the party wants you, rather than you making the party become like you. As scholar Zheng Yongnian pointed out, contemporary China does indeed have an emperor – but it is in the form of the organisation of the Communist Party, rather than a human individual.²

In